


2190 Bad Days

by Wagontrain



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Graduate School
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-08 21:55:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7775134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagontrain/pseuds/Wagontrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Graduate school is enough to drive anyone insane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	2190 Bad Days

Harleen sat before her laptop, drumming her ragged fingernails against the desk and staring hard at the screen. The video chat window sat open, its contact list filled with friends and family all sorted under ‘most recently contacted: more than a month ago.’ The one contact she needed to see, Dr. Debenedetti, wasn’t there. “It’s okay,” Harleen murmured. “Christina’s dinner isn’t for another hour yet. Plenty of time, right?”

The program _ding_ ed, and Harleen hammered her mouse button. The window shifted to a shot of a bland hotel room, and Dr. Debenedetti moved into frame. She looked regal in a way Harleen could never replicate, her silver hair looking dignified in a way that Harleen’s own grey strands hiding among the blonde never did. Maybe it was a tenure thing. “Harleen? I’m glad you’re on-line early. I only have a few minutes to talk.”

“Actually…” _I’ve been waiting for you for half an hour, you forgot what time we were supposed to talk_. Harleen pressed a smile on her face. “Right, thank you! I wanted to let you know that my internship at Arkham Asylum is going well. They have me in the low-security section, but my supervisor is going to let me begin working with the eccentric-psychotic patients later this week. He agreed to let me begin working with the Jo-”

“Supervillains?” Dr. Debenedetti pinched the bridge of her nose in a familiar pose. “Harleen…look. I know that working with supervillains is a passion for you. I _respect_ that you have a passion. It’s why I backed your application when the rest of the psychology faculty wanted to reject you, because I thought your passion would help you to finish. I hoped that you’d do better than Julianne, at least.” _Julianne got pregnant, that doesn’t mean she didn’t have ‘passion,’_ Harleen thought sourly. Dr. Debenedetti looked at her with sad eyes. “But you need to look at your progress here. As it stands, your time to completion is already going to be six years, which is one more than I generally consider acceptable for my advisees. I know you’re busy with your internship, but you need to be prioritizing your dissertation work. Have you even seen the comments I sent back to you?”

Harleen nodded like a bobblehead. “I did! Yes. I responded to them?”

“Good,” Dr. Debenedetti said. “The point is…Harleen, what is your dissertation about?”

Her tone reminded Harleen of a parent reminding their child to wash their hands. “’Attachment Styles Among Repeat Offenders,’” she recited from rote.

“Right. Supervillains don’t play into that, Harleen.” Harleen opened her mouth to disagree, with _actually supervillains are definitionally repeat offenders_ , and _I think that this might do a good bit to explain the supervillain phenomena_ and _I’m concerned that referring to them as ‘supervillains’ is only giving them a sense of power and authority that reinforces their criminal behavior_ , but Dr. Debenedetti continued on regardless. “I’m worried about your progress. Julianne is as far behind in her Program of Study as you are, and you don’t have her excuse. You need to learn to focus.”

Harleen knew there was only one answer. “Yes, ma’am. Of course, ma’am. When can I expect to see your edits on the latest round of dissertation edits? I’m eager to get to it.”

Dr. Debenedetti scowled. “I’m at a conference right now. You’re getting…pretty much all of my free time right now, between presentations and dinner. I’ll get edits to you when I can.” She glanced down; Harleen knew she was looking at her brief scribbled notes. “I’m glad to have been able to talk to you. What else do you need from me?”

“Nothing, Dr. Debenedetti,” Harleen chirped pleasantly. “I’ve got my direction for going forward. Thank-” The connection cut before she finished, and Harleen stared at the black screen. “…you.” She felt the muscles in her jaw tense, and she shook her head to push away the anger bubbling up at her advisor’s casual dismissal. Harleen opened a new tab on her web browser for the Gotham Public Transit. A bus should be arriving a few blocks from her apartment in about five minutes; if she ran, she could catch the bus, and only be twenty minutes late for Christina’s dinner.

* * *

La Vie En Rose was the sort of restaurant Harleen would never have set foot in on her own. As a graduate student, she had trained herself through years of deprivation to subsist on store-brand pasta, tuna, and -when she felt like celebrating- half-price appetizer night at the chain restaurant near her apartment. La Vie En Rose was just too fancy for her, and her bank account.

“Harleen! Harleen!” Christina waved to Harleen her table. A slew of new faces turned towards Harleen, and she felt her eyes widen a bit. _Okay! There’s…geez, do I know any of these people? There’s like a dozen people here. How does Christina know this many people?_ Harleen tried in vain to smooth the wrinkles out of her off-the-rack skirt.

Harleen smiled broadly and waved back. Smiling had always come easily when she was scared and nervous. “Hello everyone! Christina, god, how long has it been?”

“Since I invited you out, or since you actually accepted?” Christina swept Harleen up in a tight hug. “Whatever, it’s been so long! C’mon, c’mon, sit down here.” She directed Harleen to the chair at the left of the head of the table. Across the table sat a handsome man; expensive suit, stubbly to exactly the degree of movie star-level attractive, piercing blue eyes. 

“Hi. I’m Lucian,” he said, extending his hand to Harleen. 

“Hi! I’m Harleen!” she chirped back.

“Right, the doctoral student,” Lucian replied. “Some kind of…social work?”

“Clinical psychology, right!” Harleen said. “Still counts as a doctor, though, when I get done, even if it’s not a _medical_ doctor! Ph.D. instead of M.D….” Lucian’s eyes were glazing over a bit. “How do you know Christina?”

“Er…” Lucian said, shooting a side-long glance at Christina.

Christina swept in, standing at the head of the table and raising her voice. “I am so, so glad to see all my most loved friends out here tonight. I wanted to tell you all…” she teared up a bit. “Well…I promised I wouldn’t cry…Lucian proposed to me! We’re getting married!”

“Oh,” Harleen said. “So…you’ve known her for a while?”

“A couple years now,” Lucian answered.

The other people at the table exclaimed their delight, and Harleen raised her voice with them. “I’m so _happy_ for you!” she gushed, desperately trying to remember if she’d ever heard Christina mention Lucian before, which led to unfortunate questions about whenever the last time she’d actually had a real conversation with her ex-college roommate. Instead, she reached for the bottle of white wine on the table and filled her glass. “A toast!” Harleen cried. “A toast for the best roommate anyone could ever ask for.”

That was apparently the right thing to say, because Christina turned a brilliant, white-toothed smile at her and the rest of the table raised their glasses in celebration. Harleen gave her a tight-lipped smile to hide her own less- than-perfect teeth. The waiter came by and took their orders, and Harleen smothered a gasp as she looked over the menu. _Oh my god one of these entrees is as much as I spend on food in an entire day_. Harleen did some quick math in her head. _Almost two days. Okay, it’s okay, this is what I’ve got savings for, right? OhmygodIdon’thavesavings_.

The woman to Harleen’s left smiled at her pleasantly. “College roommate? You must have known Christina for a while now.” It was a statement rather than a question, and she extended her hand. “I’m Jaime.”

“Jaime, hello!” Harleen nodded amiably. “Yeah, Christina and I have known each other for…geez, ten years now?” _How long have I been in grad school? Almost six years? Oh my god_. “We were freshman roommates. We were both looking into going into academia after we graduated, but Christina decided she wanted to actually make money, so…private sector for her!” Harleen let out a nervous titter. “What do you do?”

“Oh, well, I work for GeekWorld? It’s a LexCorp Entertainment subsidiary? I work in PR, just making us look good to the nerds who buy our stuff.” Jaime pushed back from the table, gesturing to her full belly. “But right now I’m on maternity leave? We’re having a boy!”

 _Shit_. Harleen ran through the list of things that you were Supposed To Say to expecting mothers. Most everyone in her department viewed pregnancy as a curse, and the one who hadn’t -Julianne- were nearly ostracized for not being able to keep up with the rigors of academia. “Ah…when are you due?”

“May!” Jaime exclaimed. “It’s really coming up? But I really feel myself changing even now, like, from a woman to a mother?” She peered at Harleen. “Are you thinking of having a baby?”

“Oh, I have one! I named her ‘Dissertation Quinzel!” Harleen replied with a laugh. Jaime’s confused expression told her that the joke hadn’t caught on outside of academia. She tried again. “Well…there’s a work/life balance, right?” Jaime stared back blankly. “Like, normal jobs, you go to work at nine, you finish at five, and when you’re done, you’re done! Grad school’s a little different, because when you get home from internship or teaching or whatever, you still have research and grading and whatever else to do.” _Until you pass out from exhaustion, yes_. “There’s not a lot of time outside of that.”

Jaime raised an eyebrow. “That must be hard on your boyfriend.”

“We’re…” _I haven’t had more than four dates in a row before the guy gave up on me_. “We’re not trying to _not_ to. I want to take my career seriously, you know? Getting a good tenure-track position at an R1 school isn’t some easy thing. Once I have a job and earned tenure, that’s when I’ll get serious about starting my family.” Jaime didn’t seem convinced, and Harleen pressed on. “My advisor is Dr. Debenedetti, have you heard of…?” She trailed off, realizing that no one outside her field could reasonably be expected to have heard of Dr. Debenedetti’s ground-breaking research. “Well, she actually got tenure while she was pregnant with her first child. She’s talked about how she and her husband make both of their careers work, on top of all three of their children. She makes it look so easy! If you’re determined and you want it enough, it’s doable.” Jaime still didn’t look impressed, but Harleen chalked that up to her never having sat for qualifying exams, never having experienced the quiet terror of defending a dissertation proposal, or never having gone through the horror of the APPIC internship match, let alone the endless stress of taking classes, providing therapy, and teaching all in one day. 

“So wait, you’re just a student?”

 _If you can still call me a ‘student’ after more than a half a decade of training, sure! Like your friend who took a psychology classes because she didn’t understand why her boyfriend broke up with her_. “I mean, at this point I’m a doctoral candidate, so, I mean…kind of a student? I’ve taken a few more classes.” 

The waiter returned with alacrity that said _holy shit this is a classy restaurant_. The alfredo tasted the sort of delicious that devastated Harleen’s pretenses of dieting, and her pretenses of building up her savings. She ate it anyway, because Christina would have been disappointed if she didn’t.

* * *

Harleen stood in front of the interview room door, and took a deep breath to try to pull herself through the fog of exhaustion and caffeine buzz. The security guard watched her with a wary eye. “Ms. Quinzel, you’ve got to be paying attention here and taking this seriously.”

“I’m right here! You were saying the Joker is dangerous.” She tapped her clipboard. “We’re just going to talk, and he’s chained up. Arkham has its security protocols, and for a very good reason. I am going to follow them to the letter. I’m really here for the experience.”

The guard glared at her, uncertain if she was mocking him or not. If she was being honest, Harleen wasn’t entirely sure either. When she’d started her doctoral program, she’d been full of fire and determination to understand and rehabilitate so-called supervillains. Now, she just wanted the entire mess of graduate school over with. _You have to love it enough to start it_ , one of her doctoral cohort had said, _and hate it enough to finish it_.

“Taking security seriously means not giving him any openings.” The guard pulled the clipboard out of her hand. “Do you need those glasses?”

“Only if I want to _see_ ,” Harleen responded.

He didn’t like that answer, but accepted it with a grunt. “Lady, I’ve seen what that psycho can do with random shit. Be _careful_ in there, even if he is chained up.” 

Harleen grimaced. “Calling him names doesn’t help anything.” 

“Only one thing you can do to help a rabid dog,” he answered, but opened the door for her. 

The Joker sat at the interview table, the chain of his handcuffs trapped by a clasp bolted to a table. His skin was chalk-white, but to her eye he wasn’t wearing any apparent make-up. A brutal bruise marred his forehead and cheek. “Mister…Mister Joker? My name is Ms. Quinzel, I’m one of the practicum therapists here at Arkham. How’d you get that bruise?”

He looked up at her, raising one sculpted eyebrow. “I had an _unfortunate_ incident with a man who dresses up like a bat. You’d think that a person who starts _there_ would have a sense of humor, but my goodness he is just not capable of being funny.”

“I’m sorry you were injured,”

“You try to bomb one orphanage…” the Joker peered at her ID badge. “What’s this? They send me a Master’s level clinician? Not a Ph.D.? Not an M.D.? Not even a _Psy.D._? I thought this place had standards.”

“I’m a doctoral candidate,” Harleen replied. 

He continued to read from the badge. “’Harleen’? What’s the matter…did daddy want a motorcycle and get a baby girl instead?”

She gritted her teeth. “I’m more interested in you.”

“Oh, of course!” The Joker made a show of looking around the room. “Well, here I was all about to tell you about my mother, but I don’t see one of those long couches. Too bad.” 

“You’ve gone to a lot of effort to develop a clown motif. Why is that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I just like to make people laugh.” He watched her neutral expression. “Nothing at all? Not even a giggle?”

“I guess I just don’t see the humor in murdering children.” Harleen paused. The Joker was smart sure, but eccentric psychopaths tended to have egos that could be provoked. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but is the clown make-up a fetish? Some sort of sexual component?”

“Sex? What, like _intercourse_?” The Joker sneered. “Never tried it.”

“Too much personal vulnerability?” Harleen prodded.

“Never got the point.” He turned his hands palm up. “I mean, what, _pleasure_? _Procreation_? It’s just so silly, don’t you think?” 

_Definitely unusual presentation in his view of sex, but not the right to path to explore right now_. Harleen shrugged. “All right. With most clients I’d spend some time talking around their pathology to explore how they understand themselves. But you’re clearly an intelligent, thoughtful individual person, and I think if I just ask you directly you’ll be able to answer. Why do you commit your crimes?”

“Great question, Harley! I’m going to answer it with a question of my own.” The Joker continued forward through her objection. “You ever hear the old joke about the clown Pagliacci?”

“Sure,” Harleen said. “A guy goes to a doctor about being depressed. The doctor tells him to go see some famous comedian to feel better, but it turns out that the guy _is_ the comedian.”

The Joker grinned broadly. “Right! But what happens after that?”

“Well…nothing. The joke’s over,” Harleen said.

“Nope! Wrong!” He tipped back in his chair as far as he could while still cuffed to the table, and let out a sharp cackle. “The joke is _never_ over.”

Something about his smirking dismissal rankled Harleen. “So what, we just keep suffering forever?”

“Could be. But why? Isn’t that silly? Think about all the people you know in Gotham. How many of them are breaking their poor backs just to keep up with the Johnsons? Seventy-five percent? Eighty?” He pulled a face at Harleen’s lack of response. “Seventy? We’re just haggling numbers here.” 

Harleen shook her head. “No. I think people are better off than you give them credit for.”

“Right, of course. I figure lots of people in helping professions are all compassionate and optimistic. Explains what you’re doing in here, with me.”

* * *

It was nine-thirty before Harleen got back to her apartment. Having to wait for two different buses to cross the distance between Arkham Asylum and her modest apartment in downtown Gotham took a long while. “Okay, Harleen,” she murmured to herself. “Take an hour to work on dissertation edits, then half an hour for watching the highlights of the Gotham Knights game, then bed by eleven. You’re not gonna fuck it up this time. Noooooo staying up past midnight.” 

She made her way back to her bedroom, and woke her computer. It started sluggishly, the hallmark of a computer that had been a bit out of date when she _started_ graduate school. “Come on, come on.” The computer finally roused itself, and her dissertation loomed large on the screen in front of her, right where she’d left it when she powered her computer off last night. Harleen stared at it for a long moment, her lips drawn back into something between a grimace and a sneer, before alt-tab’ing away. “Okay. I will definitely get to that later.” 

Harleen brought up her e-mail; six useless department messages, a solicitation from the university for her to donate money, as if she wasn’t giving them several hundred dollars this semester already, and a slew of spam messages from women’s clothing and make-up companies. _God, I feel like I’m just smart enough to recognize how the beauty-industrial complex is designed to fuck with me, and just dumb enough to fall for it_. She clicked through the different pictures of women who were skinnier than she was, and tanner than she was, and all-around prettier than she was, and hated herself for wondering if their products wouldn’t make her as attractive as the models were. _It’s just Photoshop, right_?

A new message filtered into her family folder, and Harleen groaned inwardly. It was from dad. “Okay, what now?” she asked, and clicked on the message. It was from her father’s e-mail account, but she heard her mother’s voice pushing through the text: _Dear Harleen, We were truly disappointed to hear that you wouldn’t be able to make it home to Easter this year. I know you’re busy, but Brooklyn isn’t that far from Gotham. You’re school’s academic calendar says that your closed for spring break, are you sure you can’t come out then?_

“ _Undergrads_ get spring break,” Harleen said out loud, despite herself. “ _Grad students_ are more like over-trained, underpaid labor. Spring break is just the time we have to catch up on the work we actually need to do without being distracted by everything else.”

_Nana misses you fiercely, since you weren’t able to come out for Christmas either. Since your not going to be around, your Uncle James asked me to let you know that your cousin’s application to the Rhode’s scholarship has been accepted, and she will be beginning at Oxford in the fall. Your mother & I put together a gift for her, but since you won’t be there for Easter you’ll have to send her your own. I know your schooling is important, but I wish you’d show your family the same deference you show you’re advisor._

_‘Your’ advisor, dad, come on_ , Harleen thought. She squished that thought down, though; her father worked in a steel mill in Pennsylvania for thirty years and gave her the money for her undergraduate education as a _gift_ , what right did she have to condemn his grammar? 

_Your mother and I want to see you again. It’s been so long since you’ve been home._

Well, _that_ was true. A few years ago Harleen had taken an informal poll of her doctoral cohort, and the consensus was that no one had time for the pleasant little things like _going home_. How utterly decadent would it feel to spend an entire break _not_ working? She opened up a reply e-mail, but there were too many things she wanted to say. Instead, she opted to say nothing and closed the window.

* * *

“We’ve all got our bugaboos, don’t we, Harley?”

It was impossible to relax around the Joker; his energy and cheerful malevolence enough to keep Harleen on edge. Despite this, she found that there was something downright charming about his manner. She made a show of buying into it, of feeding his ego with flattery and respect, and he responded by being more open with her. “I’ve got a dissertation chair who won’t give me the time of day,” she agreed.

“Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth!” He pulled a sorrowful face. “I’ve never been in anything so _brilliant_ as a graduate program, but I’ve spoken with any _number_ of doctors in the past and from what they said, an advisor is supposed to be your strongest ally! A parent after you’ve forsaken your parents in favor of the thrill of research or whatever it is you all do.” The Joker shrugged. “Why, for me it’s the Bat! Think about it. Here I am, just trying to live my life and he won’t stop butting in!”

“I think you’re minimizing the egregiousness of your crimes, Mister Joker” Harleen said. 

“Oh,” the Joker waved her comments away. “Have you seen those kids Batman runs around with? The girl’s Halloween costume is _mostly_ black, except for all the yellow and the bright red hair, and I can tell you from personal experience that Decoy the Boy Blunder’s garish get-up really draws the eye…” His voice dropped nastily, “…and the bullets. That’s child endangerment, if you ask me. And yet I’m locked up in here and he’s out beating up people whose only crime was being so poor that their best option was to work for _me_. Imagine the mental gymnastics _that_ must take! It might surprise you to know that even in the criminal underworld I have something of a negative reputation.”

“And here I thought the Clown Prince would get some respect.”

The Joker tittered. “It’s not exactly _undeserved_. It may shock you to know that I’ve been known to sometimes kill some of my own men.”

Harleen sat back in her seat. “Why? They’re supposed to help you do your crimes, right?”

“And they’re wonderful at it…so long as you keep them away from caped do-gooders. Ha! There was one time when one of my henchmen tried to go straight. Said that he wanted to do some legitimate work as a secretary or something. I gave him a send-off, one last drink for the road, you know? Naturally it was mostly Joker toxin, and he died with a smile on his face.” He laughed uproariously, and stopped suddenly when he saw Harleen’s disapproving frown. “Well, maybe you had to be there.”

She shook her head. _Time to start challenging him_. “I wonder if the problem you’re running into is that there are rules to the world and how to behave with regards to other people, and you believe yourself beyond them. But they’re still there, and they keep getting you sent back to places like here. So why do you keep banging your head against the law? Some sort of adolescent defiance?”

“ _Rules_?” the Joker pondered. “Well I don’t recall that from the users’ manual. Rules…? Hmm…where would I find those?” Harleen didn’t rise to his bait. “It’s not that I don’t follow peoples’ _rules_ , it’s that they’re all made up. The set of a stage play; looks great from the audience, but you get back stage and you can see all the bare wood and artificiality. My pointy-eared friend sees it, too. That’s why I love him so much! He gets the punchline without even knowing the joke.”

“You’re saying the Batman’s vigilantism is the same as your terrorism?”

“There’s really not that much space between the two, if we’re being honest.” The Joker grinned. “But if dressing up like a bat or a clown makes us insane, then I say _guilty as charged_. There’s freedom in disregarding rules. C’mon, Harley! How many asinine rules do you have to follow in grad school? ‘You have to turn this paperwork in on paper, but _that_ paperwork electronically. Nevermind that they’re two forms that do basically the same thing.”

“I hate the Oxford comma,” Harleen said, surprising herself.

“It’s so stogy, isn’t it? I’ll tell you what, comma, you’ve had your day in the sun! Clear out!” Harleen laughed. “What else?”

“I don’t even enjoy doing research,” she blurted out. “I’ve got questions I’d like to answer, but I don’t care about the research classes and the APA formatting and whatever else. I started my program because I wanted to work with _people_ , not statistics programs.”

“A Ph.D. candidate who doesn’t want to do research? Why, that’s…crazy.”

Harleen looked down at her hands. “I’m just…I just struggle with meeting the expectations of the program. The problem is me, other people can get through just fine.” 

“Do you ever wonder if maybe your entire conceptualization of _insanity_ is just that little bit off? All of you running around with your medical model, going ‘hmm, what’s the _problem_? What’s the _deficiency_? What pills can we give you to put your humors back in order? Plenty of doctors have given me tests, and you know what they found, Harley?” Despite herself, Harleen shook her head. “ _Nada_. Nothin’! I’m humorous!” The Joker chortled at the little pun, before his expression sobered. “Point is, maybe the rules of your program, and of Gotham, really _are_ arbitrary and bizarre. So maybe being insane is the sane move. It’s adaptive!” 

“Not caring about the rules?”

“Why, recognizing that they don’t matter at all, my dear. You’re standing on a stage, trying so very hard to convince the audience that the set is real. For most people, one really bad day is all it’d take to convince them to start knocking over the scenery instead.” The Joker leaned forward, peering at Harleen. “How many bad days have you had?” 

_How many bad days_ have _I had_? Harleen wondered. She leaned forward across the table, mirroring his posture. “Tell me more.”


End file.
